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Workplaces constitute one of the more interesting sites where individuals 'do gender', while at the same time constructing their professional identities and meeting their organisation's expectations. Drawing on interactional data recorded in New Zealand professional organisations, this paper focuses in particular on how participants manage and interpret the notion of 'femininity' in workplace discourse. In much current usage, the concepts 'feminine' and 'femininity' typically evoke negative reactions. Our analysis suggests these notions can be reclaimed and reinterpreted positively using an approach which frames doing femininity at work as normal, unmarked, and effective workplace behaviour in many contexts. The analysis also demonstrates that multiple femininities extend beyond normative expectations, such as enacting relational practice (Fletcher 1999), to embrace more contestive and parodic instantiations of femininity in workplace talk.

This paper explores how leadership is done in a 'leaderless' team. Drawing on a corpus of more than 120 hours of audio-recorded meetings of different interdisciplinary research groups and using a discourse analytic framework and tools, we examine how leadership is enacted in a team that does not have an assigned leader or chair. Our specific focus is the discursive processes through which team members conjointly solve disagreements and negotiate consensus -which are two activities associated with leadership (Holmes 2000).More specifically, we analyse how meaning is collaboratively constructed and how team members derive at a solution in those instances where there is some kind of disagreement or even conflict among team members.This discourse analytic study thus contributes to leadership research in two ways: i) by exploring some of the discursive processes through which leadership is actually performed in a 'leaderless team', and ii) by looking at a largely under-researched leadership constellation, namely distributed leadership. We thereby illustrate some of the benefits that discourse analytical approaches offer to an understanding of the specific processes that are involved in the complexities of leadership performance.

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